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Opening shots were fired Friday in the RealNetworks v. DVD-CCA case. Unfortunately, the public was excluded from key parts of the battle, when the presiding judge, Marilyn Hall Patel, granted DVD-CCA's request to close the courtroom.

Thanks to the generosity of Google, we can now offer scholarships to individuals who wish to attend the EFF Bootcamp on User-Generated Content taught by EFF attorneys on May 11 at Golden Gate University School of Law in San Francisco.

If you would like to attend the bootcamp, but cannot afford the fee, send us a short note at bootcamp@eff.org, saying why a scholarship is appropriate for you. We'll make the decisions in early May. Sign up now!

An enterprising YouTube user has completed a fascinating set of tests to figure out how sensitive the audio fingerprinting tools are in YouTube's Content ID system. (This is the system being used by Warner Music Group to do wholesale censorship of music, including clear fair uses, on YouTube.) After uploading 82 videos that include altered versions of The Waitresses' hit, "I Know What Boys Like," the experimenter comes up with a number of interesting conclusions:

Can a noncommercial critical website use the trademark of the entity it critiques in its domain name? Surprisingly, it appears that the usually open-minded folks at Wikipedia think not.

Last February, a pair of artists, working with several collaborators, created a Wikipedia article and invited the general public to add to it, following Wikipedia’s standards of credibility and verifiability. The work was intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. But Wikipedia editors did not take kindly to the project, and it was shut down within fifteen hours for being insufficiently “encyclopaedic.”

Fast forward a couple of months. The artists, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, have created a noncommercial website that documents the project, called Wikipedia Art. The domain name for the project: wikipediaart.org.

The L.A. Times Technology Blog hits the nail on the head, responding to news that the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has sent out letters asking for help investigating security breaches caused when government employees and contractors who use P2P software accidentally share information on networks like Lime Wire.

Reports in Congressional Quarterly and the New York Times indicate that a National Security Agency (NSA) wiretap authorized by the FISA Court recorded Rep. Jane Harman trading political favors with a suspected Israeli agent. When the FBI attempted to open a criminal investigation into the matter, Attorney General Gonzales allegedly intervened because he "'needed Jane' to help support the administration's warrantless wiretapping program."

Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) published a detailed opinion column in the New York Review of Books today, proposing "legislation to keep the courts open to suits filed against several major telephone companies that allegedly facilitated the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program."

While telecom immunity legislation passed Congress last year, EFF's litigation against the telecommunications giants remains pending before the Court, as Judge Vaughn Walker considers whether the controversial legislation is constitutional. Senator Specter's bill "would substitute the government as defendant in place of the telephone companies."